What’s happened to Giorgia Meloni? Nationalist Euroskeptics will be asking themselves the same question following the suggestion that the Italian Prime Minister urged Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch to shun Nigel Farage’s Reform UK at a meeting in Rome this week.

Meloni reportedly told Badenoch to “be your own woman and stand your ground” against Farage by resisting deals with the Tories’ insurgent Right-wing rivals. The exhortation echoes the famous motto with which Meloni once horrified Europe’s centrists: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian. They cannot take this away from me!”

The Italian premier has since denied that she gave Badenoch any such advice about Farage. But with Meloni’s coalition government threatened from the Right by the emergence of a strongly anti-immigrant party led by former army general Roberto Vannacci, she appears elsewhere to be moving closer to a mainstream position in the face of insurgent hardline forces.

It’s a surprising twist, given the progressive hysteria that surrounded Meloni’s rise to power in 2022. Yet portrayals of her Brothers of Italy party as “fascist” and “far-Right” always cast more light on Left-wing shibboleths than they did on the party itself. Meloni’s tough rhetoric on migration and unembarrassed emphasis on Christian heritage were more than enough to provoke the dreaded “far-Right” pejorative from an overwhelmingly progressive European Union orthodoxy.

When she swept to power, Europe’s center trembled and Right-wing leaders such as Viktor Orbán rejoiced. Here, they thought, was a revolutionary leader with sufficient clout, at the helm of the EU’s third-largest economy, to profoundly reshape the bloc from within.

Meloni will argue that this is precisely what she has done — only in a more subtle, skillful fashion than supporters and critics expected. The EU’s Rightward shift on migration policy — in particular, its offshoring of illegal migrant processing to non-EU countries — can be largely attributed to Meloni’s influence on policymaking and the example set by her government’s agreement with Albania for the detention and processing of migrants.

Italy’s dominant influence on the migration debate was in evidence again during the Ceuta crisis at the end of July. Meloni’s performative suspension of Schengen free movement between Italy and Spain instigated an EU-wide pile-on pinning blame on Madrid’s socialist government. Yet this failed to acknowledge the dangerous dependency on the goodwill of North African dictators in controlling migration flows which the Meloni-inspired migration model fosters.

Meloni gained this influence by eschewing the destructive method of dealing with Brussels pioneered by Orbán, which many expected her to emulate, instead taking a constructive attitude towards the very establishment figures whom nationalist voters despise. Despite — or perhaps because of — her successes in navigating EU bureaucracy, she has been dismissed by Vannacci as the “watered-down Right”, with his National Future party now the “authentic” voice of Italian patriots.

The Italian premier has been brought closer still to the EU establishment by her spectacular falling-out with US President Donald Trump. In late 2025, Trump was praising Meloni as a “beautiful young woman” and “incredible”; by June of this year, he was deriding her as having “begged” him for a photo op. In a surprisingly gushing profile published by the New York Times last week, Meloni sighed that “with Donald Trump, I believed things would be easier, given our convergence on immigration and woke culture. Things have turned out otherwise.”

This comment encapsulates Meloni’s transformation. While still emphasizing the issues of immigration and Christian conservatism that propelled her to power, she now inhabits a new, center-right strand of European mainstream politics which she herself has helped to create. Whether or not she really did encourage Badenoch to reject Reform, her time in power has been marked by a personal shift from outsider to insider. Meloni is still a conservative, still a nationalist, still Christian — still Giorgia. But she is no longer an ally of Europe’s Right-wing populist insurgents.